Permission Marketing book review

It's better to ask for forgiveness than permission. Unless it comes to marketing. Keep reading to find out what book I'm reviewing today. 

Hey, I'm Kyla Denanyoh. Today we're talking about the book, Permission Marketing. Seth Godin wrote this book. The genre of the book is nonfiction. The theme of the book is marketing and business. 

So I saw this book. Come on. The cover? Of course I had to pick up, of course. I was still going through my confidence-boosting business, so let's get it, so I picked this up. The book was very, very simple. The whole point of the book is very simple: You need to ask permission before contacting people for things. 

It makes me think about sales funnels and how you bring all these people in with your lead magnet on your website. If you don't know what I'm talking about, Google it. Then they enter their email address, and you can start emailing them. Hey, are you interested in this? Hey, do you like that? Hey, do you like this? The more people who open your emails and look at them, the further down the funnel you move. 

But the whole point is to go back years, years, years ago. This book's examples are about Yahoo and AOL. These are not prevalent now; AOL just stopped using their email addresses. These are old examples, but the point is still relevant. 

Honestly, this book is the precursor to most online marketing. MailChimp and ConvertKit are where you put customers into a sales funnel and then start to predict what they need and how you can show them that you have value so that they buy from you. 

The entire point of Permission Marketing is that you should have your customer's permission before asking them to buy from you and before you ask them to read your things and do all the stuff. Once you have willing participants, selling to them is much easier. That's what we call having a warm lead versus a cold lead.  

If I post the sweatshirt I'm wearing on my Instagram right now, I might get a couple of people who like the picture, but they won't say anything about it. If I post this shirt on my You Are A Lawyer podcast page, full of lawyers, law students, and people who know me from law school, they'll probably say, "Yo, where can I buy that shirt?" 

It's the difference between having a code lead, someone you know casually from anywhere, and a warm lead. And then, if we narrow that down even further to people who are part of my newsletter list, it is not a plug unless you're interested in lawyer things or think I'm cool. Still, you will be a warm lead if you are one of the You Are A Lawyer newsletters. You're used to hearing from me, you're used to getting emails about the podcast and things I'm doing and all of that kind of stuff, so you'd probably say, oh, of course, the next step would be for her to have a shirt or something like that. So it's an entirely different thing. 

While reading this book, I did have to Google, is permission marketing still a thing? And I found that people still call it permission marketing. In 2023, all of this legislation and all of these legal acts stated that you cannot just collect people's data and do anything with it. Data privacy is an entirely new sphere, a new department of most law firms and corporations. So now there are all these different things. But they all grew from permission marketing because the whole point of this book is that if you have permission to contact someone about specific things, you'll have much more success selling to them. 

Excellent book. There was a point where Seth Godin told 10 things you needed, and I wrote those down. Find the lifetime value of your new customers. Find methods of dating. Are you dealing with someone who wants to be around all the time, someone who wants to be casual? You need to figure out what kind of customer you are. Third, change all of your ads to include a call to action. Measure the permissions that you achieve. Assign a person to guard the permissions. Decrease the frequency. And all this other stuff. 

So a really important book. And would I reread it? Absolutely. It's about marketing. Marketing back in 2000 is no less important than marketing in 2025.  Again, change out the companies AOL and Yahoo. Switch out those things for ChatGPT and Slack. But it's all still marketing. It's all still contacting people. And it's all still ways of turning strangers into friends and friends into customers, which is the tagline of this book. 

Until the next book review, Kyla